Composer Festival with Betsy Jolas – The End of Time

The festival’s closing chamber concert forms part of STHLM Blue Tide – concerts that welcome what defies fixed categories: music and musicians that do not lend themselves easily to classification.

The French-American composer Betsy Jolas grew up in a circle where names such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse and Ernest Hemingway were family friends. She herself studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen, whom she later succeeded as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. In her music, Betsy Jolas combines modernist sharpness with a sensitive, deeply human voice. Her imaginative music carries traces of Impressionism, but can also be incisive or fragmentary, and radiate an almost improvisatory freedom.

Olivier Messiaen was an important source of inspiration for Betsy Jolas, and the two held each other in great esteem. At the same time, their points of departure were fundamentally different. For Jolas, the human being and language are central, while Messiaen sought the eternal and the cosmic.

These contrasts are brought to life in this concert with Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, music deeply rooted in the spiritual dimension of humanity, and a newly written work by Jolas for actor, piano and string trio.

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Come early, stay late – the bar will be open before and after the concert with drinks and appetizers.

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